On Amerindian Language and (Contemporary) Poetry: Writingsouth

Abstract

Once, and again, there will have been a tradition called “the West,” which, all the same, in all likelihood, was never one except in terms of the wishful thinking of its powers-that-be and in the economy of its most tenacious adversaries, a culture universalizing by vocation (and with “culture,” a term that flowers from the same root as “colony,” the West is already speaking). At present, what goes by the name of globalization— one of its outstanding precursors being the “discovery,” conquest, and colonization of the American continent—is inscribed as an extreme, as Far West (cf. “The Great Natural Theater of Oklahoma” in Kafka’s Amerikca), in that appropriative, late-descending tradition. Here, we might interview the following issue: what is properly Western will have been, without venturing any further, (the tradition of) the proper, with its values of proximity, property, priority, and primacy. Aren’t other “cultures” disposed to a knowledge and practice of the proper? Yes, of course, but not properly. I do not mean to suggest that this framework was, or even is, without its own conflicts, inconsistencies, and detours, whether internal or in the unfurling of its expansive planetary wave. In fact, definitely, there would be much of the indefinite in it— incomplete, half-open, as it is.